New ‘anti-memoir’ is love letter to and plea for a vanishing world
The natural world has never been far from Lydia Millet’s mind. For 25 years, the novelist has worked at the Center for Biological Diversity, the Tucson-based nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting endangered species from extinction. Her novels have also touched on nature-related themes: “Mermaids in Paradise” features a marine biologist who swears she’s seen the titular creatures, while “A Children’s Bible” follows the aftermath of a powerful storm brought about by climate change.
So it’s no surprise that Millet would turn to nature as the inspiration for her first nonfiction book, “We Loved It All.” Described as an “anti-memoir,” the book is a collection of musings — some autobiographical — about our relationship with a natural world that is rapidly disappearing. It’s a fascinating book that proves that Millet’s narrative brilliance isn’t just confined to fiction.
The first section of the book, titled “When the Perfect Comes” after a verse in 1 Corinthians, begins, fittingly, with an evocation of Genesis: Man gave names to the animals, Millet writes,
“so we might better know them.” She immediately pivots to the experience of having children: “When you turn into a mother you lose the power of coldness. Lose it for good, as it happens. You never get it back. Once you have children, you know they can be hurt or even killed. Then you’re humbled forever. A beggar at the mercy of the world.”
Millet returns to these themes — the religious-like wonder that nature inspires, and the fear of her children’s generation losing so much of it — frequently throughout the book. She is particularly concerned with the way we treat animals, bemoaning their use as logos and mascots: “cheapened versions of themselves, tricked out to sell us swag.” (She does admit to a fondness for “a certain witty gecko with a Cockney accent,” though, mate.)
Millet’s love of animals came early, she writes, fondly recalling spending weekends reading at home, with cats snuggling nearby. She remembers her father giving her and her siblings rabbit’s-foot keychains, which dismayed them: “When we stroked the soft fur of those disembodied paws, it was not to bring us luck but in an act of contrition. We wanted to show those absent rabbits — hopping along sadly, somewhere, on their three remaining feet — how very sorry we were.”
Given Millet’s day job, it’s natural that the loss of animal species — we are in the midst of an extinction crisis — weighs on her mind throughout the book. She notes that Halloween pet costumes have become a huge industry, with pet owners spending $490 million on the getups in 2018 alone. (Her own children selected a bumblebee outfit for their pug, she notes.)
“Yet we hesitate to extend our caretaking into the world of animals beyond,” she writes. “The US budget for protecting endangered species from extinction, in 2018, was less than onefifth of the cost of pet Halloween costumes.”
“We Loved It All” isn’t just confined to animals; Millet also writes about the “deep anxiety” and “stultifying panic” that gripped environmentalists in the 1980s and ‘90s when the extent of the climate crisis, and the unwillingness of the public and government to do anything about it, came into sharp and terrifying focus. “To motivate change, some argue for hope over fear,” Millet writes. “Climate doomsaying, like the invocation of personal responsibility as a substitute for structural transformation, can feel like a psy-ops of despair. Encouraging apathy. In fact hope and fear run alongside each other, indivisible. And fear and despair are not equivalent.”
Millet’s book has a fascinating structure — it’s essentially a collection of vignettes, essays in miniature that connect with one another in surprising ways. One chapter starts with Millet’s reflections on fiction, then segues to the Marquis de Sade, then writing systems, peacocks, and her job after college copy editing Larry Flynt’s pornographic magazines. (One reader caught a typo that Millet didn’t, and complained to the editor. That reader was Richard Ramirez, the serial killer known as the Night Stalker, who at the time was on death row.)
In the hands of a lesser writer, the frequent switches in topics could induce readerly vertigo, but Millet is a master of the transition; the changes are never jarring or forced. The experience of reading the book feels like listening to a highly educated friend riff on whatever’s on her mind, but it’s more deliberate, more thoughtful than that — Millet sees connections that might not occur to anyone else.
And connections are at the heart of this book. Millet urges us to recognize our role in the natural world — how it has shaped us, and how we are shaping it, for better or for worse. (It is, of course, mostly worse.) She also urges us to connect to the past, to hold in our memories the lives that came before us: “In forgetting the past we forget everything. Our dismissal of the ancestors is also the dismissal of a far more expansive history — the history of what sustained them.”
This is a beautiful book, at once a love letter to life on Earth and an impassioned plea to save what we have left of it. As Millet writes, “Without the mysterious and the other and the wild, without the many gifts they give us of sustenance and cohesion and possibility, those who come later will inherit a poor kingdom. Even if our grandchildren or great-grandchildren can manage to eke out a living in the bareness of what remains, they’ll be moving through time as orphans.”
WE LOVED IT ALL: A Memory of Life By Lydia Millet W.W. Norton, 272 pp., $27.99